Three more requests for Eskom report
Only three more people have petitioned Eskom to release its Dentons report in terms of Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia) submissions.
Eskom made a surprise Uturn on Tuesday and released the report only to Pieter-Louis Myburgh, DA MP Natasha Mazzone, Nicolaas Edward Blom and the South African History Archive even though the power utility had called a briefing, saying it would make the report public.
Those who got the report at Eskom’s headquarters on Tuesday had made Paia submissions to access it.
Eskom’s media desk said on Wednesday that only three more people had made Paia submissions, asking for the report. Copies of the report would be made available on request from the public and would be decided on a case by case basis.
The final report is widely believed to be a sanitised version, with the names of senior executives implicated in Eskom’s woes blacked out.
On Tuesday, Eskom chairman Ben Ngubane evaded questions about allegations made in the initial report, which Business Day sister publication the Financial Mail has seen, saying that he had to make a “trade-off” between a prolonged investigation of the allegations or fixing the crisis at the parastatal. Asked why Eskom did not release the report to all those who had attended Tuesday’s briefing, Ngubane said: “Our intention was to release the report, but we sought legal counsel this morning and couldn’t go against it.”
Dentons MD Noor Kapdi conceded that, “since launching the investigation in 2015, there are other areas that warrant further investigation”. Ngubane and Kapdi said it had been cut short at Eskom’s request.
Eskom board member Venete Klein said there were iterations of the report that contained numerous allegations against board members that were not corroborated. These iterations were subsequently collected and destroyed.
Klein said Eskom would not have come out of its crisis if the report had come out sooner.
Ngubane urged South Africans to remember the state of Eskom in 2014 and how the state-owned entity had since turned around. He refused to say whether the Dentons initial report had implicated any of the board members or himself.